Boardinghouse

Years ago, murders occurred in a boarding house. Psychic playboy Jim Royce (director John Wintergate) moves in, and has hot naked chicks surrounding him. No, this is not a porno. Unsurprisingly, the house isn't too keen on this, and soon, bad special effects and more come to terrorize those in the house.

Shot on Video (the first horror movie to be SOV in fact) and released theatrically (yes, a SOV movie came to theaters) in 1982, "Boardinghouse" defies any real proper description. The acting boarders on Amateur Porn levels, the music is a blatant "Halloween" rip off, the gore is unconvincing, the 80's fashion styles are an offense to the eyes, and the plot (so to speak) is a ramshackle of odd events.

That out of the way, the movie is never boring. Yes, it's bad. Yes, it is deficient of any real technical merit. Yet, you can't stop watching it. It's a level of bad that manages to be somewhat enduring in it's ineptitude. The movie moves along, though it never really goes anywhere. Hot chicks are knocked off randomly, without any reason to care about any of them.

In short, to say it's incoherent would be an understatement. It's a movie that defies any real explanation, and is unlike anything I've ever seen before. Whether or not I want to see something like it again I don't know.

If you're evaluating this movie in terms of plot structure or character arcs, you're missing the point. If you're saying "the image quality isn't sharp enough," you are consuming the wrong genre.

If you do like backyard horror films, Boardinghouse belongs in the good pile. It has something that most of these films lack: passion. The filmmakers clearly put in more time, effort, planning, and care than most of their peers. The result is something with a vision and level of energy that's hard to replicate, even on films with budgets in the millions.

I own not one, but two copies of this movie and both of them are the "directors cut", which would be fine except both copies are nothing BUT the directors cut, without the option of watching the movie as it is actually supposed to be viewed. Brutal. At 2:35.00, it's easy to see how an hour could be shaved off this thing. If you miss the 80's, you can leave this thing running with the sound off while you are making a tuna casserole with music playing in the background but sitting down and watching it is tedious and borders on masochistic. It's a shame because it actually looks like an OK piece of 80's shlock. The girls are mostly hot, show skin and the death scenes are decent, while the leading man looks like David Lee Roth's tweaked-out second cousin and for some reason seems to have given up acting after this mess. Can't imagine why.

I worked at a video store where we happened to have a copy of boardinghouse, and after laughing uncontrollably at the cover, I talked some friends into renting it. Since then, for about 4 years straight we would always rent boardinghouse on new years eve and watch it prior to the ball drop, as it became a cult tradition in our area. My favorite line has to be when one of the random men walk in and say "What is this, a harem?" and a random woman replys in a high pitched voice, "no." the mans response is just, "Well, sh*t." who can write dialogue like that? Great scenes include when the refrigerator throws food upon one of the young women, and you can see the arm stretching out of the fridge to throw yogurt at the poor actress. A truly bad movie that is a gas to watch, I would love to get a copy on tape, but 'tis hard to find.

This movie is not just truly awful, but its also historically significant in its awfulness because it was the first shot-on-video horror movie and as such actually contributed to the slow decline of the low-budget horror genre. Let me explain. By the early 80's the traditional venues of horror movies--drive-in theaters and inner-city grindhouses--were disappearing. These movies SHOULD have dominated the emerging video rental market, but this didn't happen and one reason was that a lot of unscrupulous individuals said to themselves, hey, if they're going straight to video why bother shooting on film, using professional actors, or having and kind of production values when we can just take a camcorder out in the backyard? It worked for porno right? Never mind that it was impossible to create any kind of horror atmosphere on 80's video. Never mind that fake blood looks a lot more fake on video than the, uh, real bodily fluids spilled in porno movies. Never mind that horror fans are infinitely more discriminating than porn enthusiasts (you don't see anyone shelling out $30 for the widescreen special edition of "Jenna Jameson Does Everybody" or some other obscure porn title do you?) The result was that unsuspecting horror fans who got stuck with amateurish shot-on-video crap like this more than once simply quit taking a chance on renting obscure horror titles on video and the whole market (and genre) eventually went south.

OK, this movie is slightly better than other contemporary SOV crap like "Blood Cult" (a rip-off of "Blood Feast" which makes the latter look like "Citizen Kane") or "Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator (which made me want to stuff Troma's Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz in the incinerator after I rented it). It at least has a lot of nudity in it unlike those other two titles, but if you want SOV nudity, rent a porno movie for christsake. I can honestly say that not only could I make a better horror movie than this, but I HAVE made a better horror movie than this (sans the naked chicks)with my friends and my dad's camcorder back in high school. But I had the common decency not try to sell it to people it as a REAL horror movie. Total garbage. Avoid it like a social disease.